Another challenge is ready to be tackled by forensic analysts, students, hackers and alike. This time, we present you with an attack vector that has become quite successful: malicious PDF files!

For challenge 6 of our series (provided by Mahmud Ab Rahman and Ahmad Azizan Idris from the Malaysia Honeynet Project Chapter) we present you with a pcap file that contains network traffic generated by the following scenario: An unsuspecting user opens a compromised web page, which redirects the user’s web browser to a URL of a malicious PDF file. As the PDF plug-in of the browser opens the PDF, the unpatched version of Adobe Acrobat Reader is exploited and, as a result, downloads and silently installs malware on the user’s machine.

We prepared a set of questions that requires you to dive deep into the portable document format. Submit your solution by November 30th 2010. The top three submissions will receive small prizes.